A few weeks ago, I changed my religious views on Facebook to “Pepsi.” Pepsi is by far my favorite soda: I prefer it over Coke, Dr Pepper, and every other soft drink out there. Then, I started wondering why that might be.

The first time I really drank Pepsi on a regular basis was in Junior High. College Station ISD only had Pepsi vending machines in the cafetaria, so every day I forgot to bring a drink with my lunch I ended up buying a can of Pepsi. Thus, the love affair began. I have been hooked on Pepsi ever since. This is obviously brilliant marketing on Pepsi’s part. I am fully aware of my exploitation by Pepsico and I don’t even care–that’s how much I love Pepsi.

Another great example: Ikea. When I was little, my parents took us along to Ikea in Brussels while they shopped for furniture. They dropped us in the daycare center, replete with Asterix videos and a ball pit. After they were done shopping, we had meatballs with applesauce. Fast-forward nearly two decades: Jenny and I are moving to the Bay Area, specifically Emeryville, which happens to have an Ikea. I was so excited by this fact that I looked up where the Ikea was: only 1.9 miles from our new place! Granted, Ikea’s juvenile marketing is not nearly as smelly an affair as Pepsi’s, but it worked just as well.

Although the two preceding examples are only personal anecdotes, there is no disputing that marketing to children is an extremely lucrative business. It pays dividends years, if not decades, into the future. Although it is definitely not a good thing that the average child is exposed to 20,000 30-second commercials every year (I’m not sure how believable that number is, but even if it’s off by a factor of 10, the point still stands), those kinds of messages are easily forgotten. The best kind of advertsing is the kind that hits you square in the gut years after the fact. Suddenly remembering your favorite Happy Meal toy when you were five, you crave some lardy fries and a twenty-pack of chicken nuggets. The toy cost McDonalds 20 cents in 1989 and has made you spend $5 once or twice a month ever since in an effort to recapture what getting that toy really felt like.

Monday, August 10, 2009 | 23:43
Filed under: Personal, Politics/Society by Dries
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My word. I’ve been ignoring the Babblegator for nearly two weeks!

There’s a good reason for that, though. Jenny and I have now moved out of our Austin apartment. We were done yesterday (Friday) around 8 PM; she then drove to Cedar Park to stay with her dad for a few days and now I’m in College Station with my parents, unwinding before we meet up in Dallas and drive on to… *gulp*… California… on Thursday. I can’t believe it. The summer flew by. It seems like yesterday we got back from Europe, but I think the real adventure is finally about to begin.

It was an incredible pain in the ass trying to get everything packed. Our cars aren’t exactly spacious: I drive a Mazda econobox (thanks to Victor for that term!), Jenny drives a Hyundai econobox, and considering we have to move everything but our furniture (that is, clothes, kitchen stuff, computers, books, scores, etc. etc.) it was quite a challenge to cull our wordly possessions down to two cars’ worth of stuff. We had to throw away a lot of perfectly good stuff–including our microwave!–because it simply wouldn’t fit.

Anyhoo–I think we managed it pretty well in the end. I’m just going to enjoy unwinding in a nice, spacious house for a few days before setting off on our 1.973 mile Oddysey to California.

Sunday, August 9, 2009 | 0:51
Filed under: Meta, Personal by Dries
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Spasmodic Dysphonia. That’s the speech impediment Dilbert creator Scott Adams suffered from for several years. An interview in Wired magazine describes Adams’ trials and tribulations. This is how the article describes spasmodic dysphonia as it occured in Adams:

[He'd] open his mouth to talk, only to find the words tumbling out in a raspy, imperceptible staccato, chopping off sentences before they had a chance to form. If he tried to say, “Tomorrow is my birthday,” for example, it would morph into a weak “Ma robf sss ma birfday.”

However, when speaking in front of an audience, giving a lecture, his speech is loud, fluid, and clear. Each type of situation–eating in a restaurant with friends, speaking on the phone, giving a speech–has its own mercurial set of rules.

To make a long story short, Adams was able to get an operation to fix the problem. Even though he was convinced he could solve the problem himself by using a pseudo-scientific approach to his speech, nothing he tried worked. A surgeon at UCLA performed “selective laryngeal adductor denervation-reinnervation,” which basically severs the nerve that is being told to spasm. Adams had to re-learn how to talk, but six months after the procedure his speech is nearly back to normal.

Adams’ experience is painfully familiar to me. As a stutterer, I too have my own rules and regulations: for some reason, phrases starting with an “s” or an “f” are difficult for me, so I try to avoid them and figure out a way around them. Calling some stranger for information on the phone is usually not a problem, but if it’s someone I actually know but am not particularly close to I have trouble. Giving a presentation with some PowerPoint slides is not a problem, but having to read a scripted speech or making a presentation without slides does not work. I try to parse the world around me into situations I know I can handle. Of course that’s all psychological, and of course it’s not much of a solution, but it works, and that’s enough for me.

I suppose stuttering has had its benefits. I worked on getting as large a vocabulary as possible so I can use words I know I can say in a particular situation. And I guess I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like opening my mouth unless what’s going to come out is interesting and worthy of the effort I am going to have to expend to get it out there.

Nevertheless — if I could, I’d get an operation, like Adams did. I couldn’t care less if that’s considered copping out or giving up. Self-treatment of this thing simply doesn’t work. All I can do is mollify. I can’t ever actually fix it.

Thursday, July 30, 2009 | 15:56
Filed under: Personal by Dries
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So here we go: my first podcast. As I’m a huge classical music nerd, my podcasts will cover music I like; each podcast will be centered around a vague theme or idea. In the first podcast we have:

• Charles Koechlin: Sonatine No. 2, Op. 87: III, Menuet
• Einojuhani Rautavaara: A Tale of Fate, “Book of Visions”
• Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin: III, Forlane
• Igor Stravinsky: Suite #1 for Small Orchestra: Andante
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Fugue in F# Major, Op. 87 No. 13

Click here to download.

Let me know what you think! I’m quite new at this, so I’d love to hear some feedback.

I’ll be adding this podcast to the iTunes Podcast directory soon.

[Edit] I had to disable the podcasting plugin I was using (Podpress 8.8) because it was messing with the photo galleries I posted in the previous weeks.

Saturday, July 25, 2009 | 13:56
Filed under: Music, Podcasts by Dries
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I’ve been meaning to upgrade my computer for a while now. Although I’m very happy with what I have now–a nice AMD 64-FX processor, 2 gigs of RAM, 2 hard drives adding up to 570 gigs–my hard drives are filling up with music and movies and I don’t want to get rid of anything. The solution seems simple: buy another hard drive.

My problem: my motherboard only supports 2 SATA slots, so only two hard drives for me. Buying a new motherboard is really cheap these days, but the problem with that option is that my processor’s socket type (939) has been deprecated. Add to that that my RAM is DDR2 and most new motherboards now only take DDR3, and my only real option is to build a new computer altogether. I figured I could recycle some parts of my old computer and turn it into a dedicated media PC.

… and then I started doing the math.

$714. Gulp. Looks like I’ll hold off for a while!

Friday, July 24, 2009 | 15:46
Filed under: Media/Internet/Tech by Dries
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Not much in the way of carefully reasoned opinion in this post except the following:

If those wealthy republican assholes in congress screw us out of affordable health care again, I will be very angry.

Thursday, July 23, 2009 | 0:28
Filed under: Politics/Society by Dries
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Our move to California is coming closer and closer: Jenny and I will be leaving for the Bay Area (Emeryville, to be more exact) three weeks from today. We’ve been trying to pack for a few days now, but it seems that all we’ve done so far is turn our place into a labyrinthine trash heap.

My last two moves were in Austin, so I never felt a need to throw away anyting when I packed. I just taped my desk shut and wheeled it into the moving truck.

The result of that strategy is that now, nearly four years later, I have an absurd amount of stuff cluttering my room. Figuring out what can come with us to California and what gets to be trashed is taking a long time. Still, it’ll be nice to start with a clean slate once we arrive… and it should be much easier to keep our new place clean without all of that extraneous garbage lying around!

We’ll be selling off most of our furniture too, so if you should want a desk, table, chairs, futon, TV stand, or book case, and you happen to live in Austin, send me a note.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 | 8:08
Filed under: Meta by Dries
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First things first: I uploaded 56 pictures of our Eurotrip to Flickr. You can check them out here.

In other news: after 60 years, Jimmy Carter has left the Southern Baptist Church over its “subjugation of women”. Quoth Carter:

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities. [...] The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.

I wholeheartedly agree with Carter, by the way, and I think it’s incredible that, after six decades of public involvement, he’s chosen to distance himself. I would go a step further, however: male religious leaders have used their “option to interpret” for many more purposes than subjugating women. Selective use of biblical passages is hypocrisy of the first order: you can’t both outlaw homosexuality and eat shellfish; you can’t both think of women as your property and give her gold or pearls. Picking and choosing is not an option if your world view is as black and white as your favorite biblical commands say it is.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 | 13:06
Filed under: Current Events, Politics/Society by Dries
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I uploaded some pictures to my Flickr account of my trips to California and Arizona in June. Check ‘em out!

Friday, July 17, 2009 | 18:16
Filed under: Out and about, Pictures by Dries
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After we got back from Norway, Jenny and I spent a day in London. Since we were running out of money, we decided to only go to free attractions. While a few of London’s more famous tourist traps–the Eye, Buckingham Palace, and Madame Tussauds, to name a few–are fairly pricey, the city has an amazing collection of free things to do.

We started off the day at the Wellcome Collection, a museum displaying an “unusual mixture of medical artefacts and original artworks exploring ‘ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art.” We spent most of our time in the ‘History of Medicine’ section, which, despite its stolid sounding name, was actually very interesting and interactive. The main exhibit concerned four themes, including obesity, malaria, and ‘The Body,” exploring medical imaging.Two displays caught my eye, in particular. One had the entire human genome in book form, taking up an entire book case and approximately a hundred volumes of tiny 5 pt text. The other was a sculpture about obesity. Check out the pictures below.

After lunch, we went to the National Gallery, a huge museum on Trafalgar Square. Just like the Wellcome Collection, admission is free. The museum’s collection is staggering: it has multiple paintings by Van Gogh (including the famous Sunflowers), Cezanne, Monet (including two of the Water-Lily Pond series), Michelangelo, Rubens, and Van Eyck (including the photo-realistic Arnolfini Portrait). According to the museum, these paintings “belong to the public,” which is why admission is free. I definitely got my money’s worth.

On Trafalgar Square, just in front of the museum, there is currently a different sort of art going on. For 100 days, starting on July 7th, randomly selected people have been allowed on to the square’s Fourth Plinth, a large empty pedestal, for one hour. Participants are allowed to do whatever they want and are not allowed off until their one hour has expired. When we were eating lunch on the square, a young woman was downing a bottle of wine. After we left the museum, another woman wearing some angel wings had turned on a bubble machine. Apparently, participants have not been particularly creative with their hour in the limelight. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets naked or starts throwing water balloons at the audience below.

We spent the last three days with Jenny’s aunt Sally near Portsmouth before we headed back to the US. It was a nice respite from traveling before jumping on yet another airplane. We visited HMS Victory, Nelson’s ship during the Battle of Trafalger, among other things.

Anyhoo–here are some pictures!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 | 14:45
Filed under: Out and about, Pictures by Dries
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